How Hyrox created a new sports category and scaled it through community (Credit: CNBC video)

This CNBC video on Hyrox brought together two of my interests, building a business and fitness.

Here are my learnings from the video.

Moritz Fürste, a two-time Olympic champion and former world player of the year, is one of the world’s most accomplished field hockey players.

After leaving the sport, he wanted to build a second career.

He started Hyrox with experienced operator Christian Toetzke.

Hyrox began in Hamburg in 2017 with 650 participants and survived COVID. According to the video, they could reach US$270m in revenue in 2026, with 1.5m participants across 34 countries.

The value: Creating a new sports category, "hybrid racing"

Millions of people train in gyms every day. As Fürste puts it: “52% of the people that go into the gym consider fitness their sport. There was no sport of fitness.”

Hyrox helped to create a standardised sport that people could train for, compete in and identify with.

Staged like an arena event, it also becomes a complete sporting experience.

Fürste wanted participants “to feel like Olympic athletes walking into a big arena, to feel very special, to have their names on screens.”

The business: "Making gyms part of the distribution network"

What appeals to me is the authenticity of their growth strategy.

I learned from Fürste’s explanation of why top-of-funnel paid advertising did not work well for Hyrox.

As a new category, it required significant market education and trust. Local communities were better placed to introduce the concept.

Also, Hyrox could have opened its own studios, but chose not to.

“We don’t want to get into competition with our 16,000 gym partners.”

Instead, it licenses gyms and provides training support, while the gyms nurture their member relationships.

The drive: Building a second arena

Fürste spoke to CNBC about the void athletes experience when their careers end. What he wanted next was “to feel that fire, that intrinsic motivation for something again that I had when I was an athlete”.

He bet everything on building Hyrox with no plan B.

In doing so, he created a wonderful opportunity for more people to experience sports.

“Music and sports are the only two things in the world that can bring people together... and these are celebration moments that we want to create.”

A gym-goer enters a packed arena, competes with their name on the screen, and finishes with a sense of achievement and “pure joy”.

So, Hyrox created and scaled a new sports category like this:

1. Create a meaningful challenge
2. Make progress visible
3. Celebrate the achievement
4. Let trusted communities drive the message

But whatever the scale, I feel this one thing is already amazing: it's already helping more people move more and feel happy.